Al Roberts is a piano player at a rather seedy nightclub in New York. When his girlfriend Sue lights out to Hollywood to try and make it in the movies, Al follows her. He's hitchhiking through Arizona when he's picked up by a man by the name of Charles Haskell. Things go downhill from there.

Detour was produced by Producers Releasing Corporation, a "Poverty Row" studio that usually confined itself to cheap disposable B-Movie productions. While still being shot relatively quickly and cheaply, Detour was more artistically ambitious than the time-fillers that constituted most of PRC's productions.

Detour provides examples of:

The Chanteuse: Sue, Al's girlfriend at the nightclub. Her decision to go to Hollywood to pursue a movie career is the trigger for tragedy.

Dead Person Impersonation: Al Roberts hitches a ride with a man who dies soon afterward. He takes the dead man's car and identity. Of course, this being film noir, he soon encounters a dodgy dame and things go from bad to worse.

He got one of them recently, from being scratched by a hitchhiking woman. That woman is Vera. Roberts also picks her up later (all three of them were heading in the same direction on the same road, after all). Because she knows what Haskell looks like, she figures out that Roberts killed him and stole his identity.

The other he got when he was duelling as a kid. Because his father saw that he had been cut, Roberts cannot pretend to be Haskell to get the dying father's money as he doesn't have a matching scar.

Femme Fatale: Vera sees through Roberts' ruse and blackmails him. She insists that they should milk the situation for all they can, instead of trying to distance themselves from it.

Framing Device: A rather desperate-looking Al in a Reno diner, drinking coffee and thinking about how everything went wrong.

Getting Crap Past the Radar: Vera suggestively lays a hand on Al's shoulder and says "I'm going to bed." When Al brushes the hand off, she stalks away in a snit.

Implied Trope: Unreliable Narrator, as noted below. Al goes to great pains to explain how Haskell died of natural causes and how that injury on his head was caused by his body falling out of the car and definitely not Al hitting him, and how Al couldn't possibly just sit and wait for the cops because of course they'd think he did it even though he totally didn't. And then his even more fanciful tale of how Vera got strangled to death when she passed out with the cord wrapped around her throat and Al just happened to yank on the cord from the other side of a shut door in order to stop her calling the cops...while the camera focuses tightly on his hands which are framed in the manner of someone committing murder by ligature strangulation.

Incurable Cough of Death: Implied. Vera has a nasty cough, and says of the prospect of being hanged: "I'm on my way now. All they'd be doing would be rushing it."

Lady Drunk: Vera spends most of the time in their shabby little room drunk.

Vera: I'm gonna see that you sell this car so you don't get caught. Al: Thanks! Of course, your interest wouldn't be financial, would it? You wouldn't want a small percentage of the profits? Vera: Well, now that you insist, how can I refuse? 100% will do! Al: Fine! I'm relieved! I thought for a moment you were gonna take it all! Vera: I don't wanna be a hog!

Second-Person Narration: Throughout, Al's narration address the audience as "you", as Al pleads with us to believe that he isn't a murderer and he didn't mean to do anything wrong and he only stole that dead guy's money and car because he had to...

"If this were fiction, I would fall in love with Vera, marry her, and make a respectable woman out of her."

Unreliable Narrator: It's implied that the main character Al Roberts is coloring events to make himself look sympathetic, and to make Vera seem more like a vicious Femme Fatale. He probably did commit the crimes in the film purposefully—his tale of Vera's death is particularly unlikely—but the story is altered by Never My Fault.

"How many of you would believe it wasn't premeditated?"

You Can't Fight Fate: Al comments more than once about how fate has victimized him. "Yes. Fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all."

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